| My topic is handedness - |
| whether in different sports it is better to be left or right-sided |
| or whether a more balanced approach is more successful. |
| I'm left-handed myself |
| and I actually didn't see any relevance to my own life |
| when I happened to start reading an article by a sports psychologist called Peter Matthews. |
| He spent the first part of the article talking about handedness in music instead of sport, |
| which I have to say almost put me off from reading further. |
| But what I soon became struck by |
| was the sheer volume of both observation and investigation he had done in many different sports |
| and I felt persuaded that what he had to say would be of real interest. |
| I think Matthews' findings will be beneficial, |
| not so much in helping sportspeople to work on their weaker side, |
| but more that they can help them identify the most suitable strategies to use in a given game. |
| Although most trainers know how important handedness is, |
| at present they are rather reluctant to make use of the insights scientists like Matthews can give, |
| which I think is rather short-sighted |
| because focusing on individual flexibility is only part of the story. |
| Anyway, back to the article. |
| Matthews found a German study which looked at what he called 'mixed-handedness', |
| that is, the capacity to use both left and right hands equally. |
| It looked at mixed-handedness in 40 musicians on a variety of instruments. |
| Researchers examined a number of variables, |
| for example, type of instrument played, |
| regularity of practice undertaken |
| and length of time playing instrument... |
| and found the following: |
| keyboard players had high levels of mixed-handedness, |
| whereas string players like cellists and violinists strongly favoured one hand. |
| Also, those who started younger were more mixed-handed. |
| Matthews also reports studies of handedness in apes. |
| Apes get a large proportion of their food by 'fishing' ants from ant hills. |
| The studies show that apes, like humans, show handedness - |
| though, for them right and left-handedness is about equal, |
| whereas about 85% of humans are right-handed. |
| Studies showed that apes consistently using the same hand |
| fished out 30% more ants than those varying between the two. |
| Matthews started researching several different sports |
| and found different types of handedness in each. |
| By the way, he uses 'handedness'. |
| to refer to the dominant side for feet and eyes as well as hands. |
| Anyway, his team measured the hand, feet and eyes of 2,611 players |
| and found that there were really three main types of laterality: |
| mixed - you work equally well on both sides - both hand and eye; |
| single - you tend to favour one side but both hand and eye favour the same side; |
| and cross-laterality - a player's hands and eyes favour only one side |
| but they are opposite sides. |
| Let's start with hockey. |
| Matthews found that it was best to be mixed-handed - |
| this is because a hockey stick must be deployed in two directions - |
| it would be a drawback to have hand or eye favouring one side. |
| An interesting finding is that mixed-handed hockey players were significantly more confident than their single-handed counterparts. |
| Things are slightly different in racket sports like tennis. |
| Here the important thing is to have the dominant hand and eye on the one side. |
| This means that there is a bigger area of vision on the side where most of the action occurs. |
| If a player is cross lateral, |
| the racket is invisible from the dominant eye for much of the swing. |
| It means that they can only make corrections much later... |
| and often the damage has been done by then. |
| And moving to a rather different type of sport which involves large but precise movements - gymnastics. |
| It's been found that cross hand-eye favouring is best. |
| The predominant reason for this is because it aids balance, |
| which is of course absolutely central to performance in this sport. |